the eric update – day 18: mucus interruptus

we still get to see a fair number of “firsts” each day and today it was the first time that kris had the opportunity to change his diaper! i would have done it, but…er…somebody has to take the pictures 🙂 next time, i’ll be eagerly standing in line. honest.

obviously its not his first diaper change. but it’s the first one that kris gets to do, with a little help from nurse denise. it’s harder than it looks with all the tubes and whatnot, but she did a fantastic job.

given all the relaxing photos of ‘roo care, you might be tricked into believing that he’s not occasionally wisked away under duress.

today, his blood oxygen took a dive and none of the typical measures to get him to breath were working.

usually that means that he’s collected a sticky wad of mucus in one of his breathing passages, which requires the nurse to suction it out.

his passages were getting clogged a bit more than normal and they were irritated as evidenced by blood getting suctioned out along with the goo. unfortunately, mucous and dried passages come with the CPAP territory. imagine having air blown in your mouth and nose 24 hours a day. i think it’s probably like driving 80 m.p.h. down the highway with your head out the window.

i know it’s “normal”, but it doesn’t make it any easier to watch the nurses shove 6 inches of tubing into his nose and retrieve great gobs of bloody goo. eric doesn’t like it much either. such is life in the nicu sometimes.

in a rare example of restraint, i’ll save you from the picture of what they pulled out of his nose.

he alarmed a bit more than usual during the ‘roo time today from all the goo;

kris did her best impression of someone attempting to relax, but she can’t fool me.

despite it all, eric reminds us that he can teach us a thing or two by taking it all in stride and getting mighty comfortable with his blanket.

he’s not actually listening to music at the moment, but he sure looks like he should be.

the kid knows how to relax, even after a day of having six inches of suction tubes jammed up his nose and down his throat.

and no, sony did not pay for that product placement in the background. hmmmmmmm

and the boy’s Got Milk. he’s on 3 cc’s an hour and tolerating it well.

i know. i know. it’s “lanugo” or as it’s more commonly known as – baby fuzz – and it’s going to go away.

but it’s growing in thick bunches all over the place and it’s amusing to wonder what life would be like for him if it didn’t fall out.

Conflux :: A Confluence of Curiousness

i’m not sure how to square these findings with the fact that i’ve long said that in a parallel universe very close to our own i live alone in cabin in the middle of nowhere writing manifestos: “The effect of population density on life satisfaction was therefore more than twice as large for low-IQ individuals than for high-IQ individuals,” they found. And “more intelligent individuals were actually less satisfied with life if they socialized with their friends more frequently.”

the heart warming fable of thanksgiving, unsurprisingly, ends up being a whole lot more complicated than some of us were taught and answers the nagging question of how squanto spoke perfect english when the pilgrims arrived and what was happening during the 100 year interim between columbus and the pilgrims ( spoiler: it involves human trafficking, enslavement and villages being wiped out ). and if you’re a stickler for tradition, you should put ditch the turkey and cranberry sauce for salted pork and olives since the spanyiards were the first to celebrate thanksgiving 50 years before the pilgrims.

“…researchers from a Bosch startup called Deepfield Robotics presented a paper on “Vision-Based High-Speed Manipulation for Robotic Ultra-Precise Weed Control,” which has like four distinct exciting-sounding phrases in it.”IEEE Spectrum

after updating to iOS 9 and el capitan i’ve been having troubles synching photos from my iphone to my macbook air. the mac would recognize the iphone but no photos would show up in the photos application or image capture. it was driving me nuts. turns out, if you have non-apple services like dropbox running that sync your photos to non-icloud services you have to turn them off.

having run a half a dozen marathons, i can’t imagine finishing in 3:05. even more unimaginable in full amish garb so kudos to leroy stolzfus. the whole article is great read but now i want to know more of the backstory on why he started to run: “A few years ago, Stolzfus got “involved with some stuff” he said he shouldn’t have. His brother-in-law suggested he start running instead when he was tempted. He took the suggestion to heart, and went out for a run.”

huh, who knew edward tufte has a farm with 234-acres of landscape sculpture fields that he opens to the public once a year. i’d love to make a trip. and i also love the article’s description of tufte, “[he] is also known as a genius of data visualization, professor emeritus of political science, statistics, and computer science at Yale, an author of books on information design, and a hater of PowerPoint.

“The Chagossian people have a word, in their Creole language, for heartbreak: sagren. It is a profound sorrow which refers to the loss of a home, and the impossibility of returning to it. As we build new worlds with our technologies, knitted from fiber-optic light and lines of code, it is incumbent on us to ensure it does not reproduce the erasures and abuses of the old, but properly accounts for the rights and liberties of every one of us.”citizen-ex